Texas Instruments gets excited about its new DSP core

Chipmaker Texas Instruments has gotten all moist over its new digital signal processor which it claims surpasses the performance of any other DSP core in the industry. TI tells us that the TMS320C66x has the the highest scores on both fixed-and floating-point performance.

It bases the claim on benchmark studies conducted by the independent third-party analysis firm, Berkeley Design Technology. The score for the C66x DSP core on the floating-point category of the benchmark is more than two times higher than any previously benchmarked device. On floating-point performance the C66x delivered a BDTImark2000 score of 10,720 which is far above the performance of previous-generation floating-point DSPs.

TI said that this will mean application developers can develop initial application implementations using floating-point math, and then decide whether performance-intensive sections of the code should be migrated to fixed-point to boost performance. Having both on the same chip should prove to be a real advantage, as TI is the only supplier offering high-performance, multicore DSP chips that support both fixed- and floating-point. As a combined fixed-and floating-point DSP core capable of instruction by instruction execution of the two processing modes, TI's C66x core achieves even greater performance in an application where each segment of code is executed in its native processing mode. Integration of fixed-and floating-point capability in the C66x DSP core eliminates costly algorithm conversion from floating-point to fixed-point and allows developers to create code with high precision that runs on a high-performance device.

The C66x DSP core was benchmarked at a clock speed of 1.25 GHz and achieved a BDTImark2000 score of 10,720 on the floating-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks, more than two times higher than the previous high score. The same C66x core received a BDTImark2000 score of 16,690 on the fixed-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks, higher than any other DSP core certified by BDTI. TI announced the new TMS320C66x DSP generation of devices, that includes pin compatible multicore DSPs in two, four and eight core versions, the TMS320C6672, TMS320C6674 and TMS320C6678 as well as a four-core communications System-on-Chip (SoC), the TMS320C6670. Additionally, for wireless base station applications, TI introduced a new SoC, the TMS320TCI6616, also based on the C66x DSP core, delivering more than double the performance of any 3G/4G SoC in the market.